Gary Shteyngart: From Leningrad with love

Now adored by writers such as Jonathan Franzen, comic novelist Gary Shteyngart
was destined for failure. He takes Duncan White on a whistlestop tour of his
family album

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Gary Shteyngart: “This was taken at a Soviet studio in which you are supposed to pose in front of the latest Soviet technology. In this case it’s a car – a Volga, I think. I’m wearing the sailor outfit that all boys from smart families are condemned to. I am terrified and crying.”

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“This was from the period when I was dating a woman who would later go to prison for bashing someone’s head in with a hammer. Apparently he looked like me. Here I am so drunk I can barely stand. And yes, I am wearing a cravat. With a silky jacket. I don’t know what I was going for.”

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 “This is my father’s side of the family in Ukraine in 1940. Just about everyone in this photo is going to die soon. Very few people survived. The Germans were going to take care of that. It was also happening to my mother’s family in Belarus. Then Stalin would mop up many of those who survived the war. A vacation to Cape Cod it is not.”

Five minutes before meeting Gary Shteyngart, I am sitting in the back of a New York taxi watching video footage on my phone of him snogging the Hollywood actor James Franco. They are pretending to be married. They are both wearing towelling bathrobes. Welcome to book promotion, Shteyngart-style.

“It was really sweet of him to do it,” Shteyngart says of Franco’s appearance in his book trailer. “He was a student in my writing class at Columbia.” The trailer is typical of Shteyngart’s sense of mischief: what better way to promote a memoir than making up a fantasy biography? He even has Jonathan Franzen make a cameo as his shrink.

The book in question is Little Failure, a memoir about Shteyngart’s early life in Leningrad, his family’s move to the United States in 1979, and his travails and (eventual) triumphs in the new country. It is laced with the humour that animates his fiction but it is poignant stuff, too.

The title is taken from the nickname conferred on Shteyngart by his mother when he was at his lowest ebb some 14 years ago. “She came to visit me in my 100 sq ft apartment,” he says. “There were giant water bugs running around. She looked it over and just said: 'You are such a little failure.’ It certainly felt like that at the time. It couldn’t get any worse.”

Then it got better. He extricated himself from the girlfriends with rage issues and the girlfriends with other boyfriends, he entered psychoanalysis, and he got a book deal. His 2002 novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, was followed by the satire of Absurdistan (2006) and the dystopian comedy of Super Sad True Love Story (2010). Exit roaches, enter Franco and Franzen.

The cover of Little Failure shows a young Gary – then Igor – in a state of comprehensive misery behind the wheel of a Soviet toy car. It is a long road ahead. Every chapter opens with a photograph from the Shteyngart archive and, in his Manhattan apartment, he takes me through the story behind each one.

He was born in Leningrad, now St Petersburg – “I was long and skinny, like a dachshund in human form” – and grew up a sickly child in Brezhnev’s Russia, suffering from asthma that could have been easily medicated in the West. As part of a trade deal, Jews were allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union and the Shteyngarts, with seven-year-old Gary in tow, headed first to Vienna, then Rome and finally to Queens and the America of the Reagan era. Shteyngart is a true child of the Cold War. And he has pictures to prove it.

His early years in the US were far from happy. Like so many immigrant parents, the Shteyngarts had great expectations for their son. The pains of adaptation and the relative poverty were justified by his eventual accession to Harvard Law School. Only it didn’t turn out that way: Shteyngart ended up pursuing a college career in drink, drugs and a failure to get laid. After all, he wanted to be a writer.

Back to that trailer: Shteyngart is shown pitching prospective titles to his publisher. “I wanted a title that celebrates my quiet brilliance,” he says. He suggests: “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mensch.” The portraits are all here, from terrified Soviet child to wild-haired wannabe writer, drunk in a cravat.

“This ladder was built by my father to cure my fear of heights. The ladder went right to the ceiling and this was a Stalin-era building so that was pretty high. They were built on a grand scale. No kidding around. I never conquered my fear of heights.”

“This was from the period when I was dating a woman who would later go to prison for bashing someone’s head in with a hammer. Apparently he looked like me. Here I am so drunk I can barely stand. And yes, I am wearing a cravat. With a silky jacket. I don’t know what I was going for.”

“Lenin and I rekindling our bromance in Moscow Square, St Petersburg. This was my childhood – the building in which we lived is just out of shot. This was the Lenin who was the subject of my first childhood book: Lenin and his Magical Goose. I would hug the podium every day – if I wasn’t in bed dying from asthma. Those trees are where I played hide and seek with my father.”

Little Failure is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To oder it for £11.99 plus £1.35 p&p, go to books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514